by Stewart Mason
Apparently continuing their willful re-creation of the career path of their beloved MC5 (all of the Spanish four-piece's members adopted the surname Sinclair in honor of MC5 manager/polemicist John Sinclair), Black Noise Is the New Sound! is Back in the USA to Tokyo Sex Destruction's Kick Out the Jams, the raucous and scathingly political Le Red Soul Comunnitte. The songs are more in thrall to MC5's garage rock forebears like the Sonics and the Chocolate Watchband, much as MC5 looked back to '50s rock & roll on their second album. (Actually, the freakbeat homage "Birds on the Velvet Roof" sounds more like an early Move B-side.) And the band's unapologetically leftist politics, though still present on songs like "New Magazines" and "Modern Education," are dialed back considerably from the first album's polemics. This makes Black Noise Is the New Sound! a somewhat more accessible, but no less passionate, piece of garage rock agit-prop. (In an amusing nod to a current trend in reissue CDs, this 22-track CD consists of 11 songs, presented in both stereo and mono mixes.)